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Avatar

In 2001, the decidedly literate nerd rock group Harvey Danger penned and sang the lines “I bowed before the avatar/He said the problem’s clear to me/You never got over Morrissey.” The rock cognoscenti would have no trouble identifying the mopey crooner Steven Morrissey of the Smiths, but they may have wondered what precisely an avatar is. Nowadays Harvey Danger would find themselves in no such peril, as avatar appears to be everywhere, though not in the sense that they intended.

The actress and writer Tina Fey, whose appeal is also decidedly nerdy, has also had avatar on her mind of late. Singing along to an “American Idol” video game in the film “Baby Mama,” Fey’s character takes a long look at her busty on-screen surrogate and remarks, with some surprise, “My avatar’s got jugs.” Quickly on the heels of “Baby Mama,” Fey struck again, this time on the TV show “30 Rock,” for which she is a writer, producer and star. “These avatars need to be able to do anything to each other,” says one character, referring to a video game he was creating, further cementing the term’s pop-culture vogue as a nascent act of Feyminism.

Derived from the Sanskrit avatra, meaning “descent,” avatar first appeared in English in 1784 to mean an incarnation or human appearance of a deity, particularly Vishnu. Hindu mythology avers that 10 incarnations of the peace-loving divinity will appear on Earth, each an avatar, or “descent,” of the god himself. (That Vishnu has four arms is not in dispute. As to the qualities of his bosom, however, the Vedas are mute.) From that celestial origin, the term’s meaning expanded beyond the strictly religious, coming to mean something akin to “an embodiment, or object of worship,” as in David Masson’s 1859 derogation of John Donne (a poet whose claim to the metaphysical was of a wholly different stripe) in his book “The Life of John Milton.” “Glad that the avatar of Donne, as an intermediate power between Spenser and Milton, was so brief and partial,” he wrote. Though Masson has assuredly done Donne wrong, it is video games to which today’s brief attention spans are partial.

The proliferation of avatar’s second meaning can be traced to Second Life, a multiplayer online virtual world, where players fashion their own online personae called avatars. The popularity of the game has shot the term into the mainstream. Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life, defines avatar in the gaming sense as “the representation of your chosen embodied appearance to other people in a virtual world.” Considering that Second Life avatars may assume literally any guise — wings, a dragon’s head, gills and flippers — the key to avatarness, in Rosedale’s view, is user control. And insofar as a Second Life avatar does and is precisely what the player wants, not just a little Mario who can be made to run and jump or a shapely diva gyrating of her own programmed will, it comes far closer to being a full-fledged virtual persona.

Rosedale balks at the use of avatar in “Baby Mama,” arguing that Fey’s sexy stand-in is not customizable or acting as she instructs her and thus not an avatar. “No one in Second Life would say that about their avatar, because they would have chosen how they wanted to look,” he says. “Fey was reacting to some video-game designer’s idea of what a female rock ’n’ roll singer looks like.”

I turned to F. Randall Farmer, a creator of the online multiplayer game Lucasfilm’s Habitat, for the origins of the term’s current incarnation. He and Chip Morningstar invented the game in 1986, when they also coined avatar in the “online persona” sense (though gamers had already been exposed to the word’s Sanskrit meaning with the 1985 computer role-playing game, Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar.) “Chip came up with the word ‘avatar,’ ” he recounts, “because back then, pre-Internet, you had to call a number with your telephone and then set it back into the cradle. You were reaching out into this game quite literally through a silver strand. The avatar was the incarnation of a deity, the player, in the online world. We liked the idea of the puppet master controlling his puppet, but instead of using strings, he was using a telephone line.”

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The new use first hit the woefully analog print media in the August 1986 issue of the computer magazine Run. Margaret Morabito wrote, “Once a human being enters Habitat, he or she takes on the visual form of an Avatar, and for all intents and purposes becomes one of these new-world beings.” Though perhaps the greater boost came in 1992 with the sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunktilious novel “Snow Crash,” where he invented his own online jargon. He called his virtual world “the Metaverse” and its digital inhabitants “avatars.” Stephenson later gave credit for the coinage to Morningstar and Farmer in the book’s paperback edition.

As for the usage in “Baby Mama,” Farmer takes a rather expansive view: “That wasn’t the original usage, but the term has really come to mean any graphic representation associated with the user, whether it’s animated or not, whether it interacts or represents the user or not. I’m just happy to see it in common use.”

And common use it has found. In the offline world, avatar has descended with a vengeance (typically Shiva’s domain, but I digress), though largely in arenas near and dear to computer fanboys’ hearts. Avatar Press publishes comic books, James Cameron has a science-fiction film slated for 2009 titled “Avatar” and both a Swedish death metal band and a professional wrestler have adopted the moniker.

As avatar abounds —Yahoo! implores instant messagers to “Express yourself with Yahoo! Avatars”(barely customizable icons) — a synonymy of online personae has emerged. Farmer notes that he’s seen toon replace avatar in certain instances: “Toon is from the online game Disney’s Toontown, and it obviously makes sense in the case of this game to tell kids to ‘customize your toon.’ For younger people who have grown up with toon, we’ll start to see it as a close cousin of avatar.” Presidential candidates may trade accusations of flip-flopping, and some may even consider themselves descendants of the gods, but in the protean domain of online people, changing your toon is all in a day’s work.

Aaron Britt is an editor of Dwell magazine.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MM12 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: AVATAR. Today's Paper|Subscribe